FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Entertainment

Hi-Res Photos Of Mars Adorn This Line Of Luxury Scarves

With "Mars, Revealed!" design studio Slow Factory has commemorated the two-year anniversary of the Curiosity rover's landing in a series of six sustainably-sourced scarves.
Images by Meredith Truax, courtesy of of Slow Factory

It's been two years since NASA's Curiosity rover touched down on Mars' surface, and since then, six-wheeled, car-sized robot has already completed it's primary mission: discovering that yes, once upon a time, life as we know it was once fashionable on the Red Planet. Forever turning cosmic curiosities into couture, Slow Factory designer and founder Celine Semaan Vernon has commemorated this special day in space history in a line of signature, sustainably-sourced silk-modal scarves.

Advertisement

Mars, Revealed!, the new collection of six scarves, features images taken from NASA’s MRO Mars High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, a University of Arizona-based image-making initiative that creates and sources some of the highest-quality images ever taken in space for free, for anyone to use. These images, for example, were snapped on the surface of Mars, near the mysterious upland Martian region of Arabia Terra. Explains Celine Semaan Vernon, "Mars, Revealed! keeps with a key theme of my work: making unreachable aspects of our world touchable and wearable. We may not live on Mars (yet!), but Mars can live on us."

Semaan Vernon describes her longtime fascination with extra-terrestrial images:

For this collection, I tried to select the ones that seemed the most mysterious, showing waves of dried water, earth-like colors, shapes that seem to look like Earth but still have this otherwordly experience to them. […] I think of myself as a curator, selecting the images that speak to me most. I often keep a very large collection that revisit and reselect many many times. Often, even the night before sending to print, I may still change my mind. 

The sentiment echoes the same aesthetic influences ("As a child I always wanted to be an astronaut, but always struggled in math and instead spent most of my time collecting images of the Universe and the Earth from above,") that inspired Slow Factory's From Above, Cities by Nightluxury collaboration with art director James Victoire. That line featured the scarves adorned with NASA satellite images taken thousands of feet above London, New York, and Paris. An Independence Day release, it served as a reminder, "to remember we are all in this together, and that from Space, things look pretty peaceful. As famously said by the astronauts that have seen the Earth from Space 'No borders of political boundaries are seen from Space.' We are one."

Advertisement

From Above, Cities by Night (2014)

But while the images themselves might be otherworldly, the one thing that links every collection is that Slow Factory's products aren't— sustainably-sourced right here on Earth, this is fashion design that aims to bring about a paradigm shift in clothing production. When asked whether or not she saw sustainable and ethical manufacturing as a sort of 'final frontier' for fashion, Celine Semaan Vernon explained, "Everything we do is certified eco-friendly and fair trade. It's the new kind of luxury, the kind that is made ethically and made to last. […] At the heart of Slow Factory lies a very simple mission: Be Aware. Our friends at Manufacture New York are opening up a huge manufacturing factory in Brooklyn and we are so excited to be among the firsts in line to manufacture with them for 2015-2016."

Says Celine Semaan Vernon, "For our upcoming collections we are going to work with other images than the NASA ones— still part of the open knowledge movement: open-sourced hardware and data visualizations." Until then, stay tuned to SlowFactory.com to get your hands on Mars, Revealed! before you end up stranded like an extraterrestrial without a scarf of your own.

Related:

Slow Factory Makes Cosmic Scarves From Space Satellite Photos

Viral Style: Smart Shoes, Computer Error Apparel, And A Hair Straightener That Dyes Your Hair

This Is The NASA Space Suit Picked By The Internet